Brass in Pocket
by LisaB-md
Summary: A series of five drabbles starring Bulma and Vegeta. Written for the Stages of Love at Live Journal.


**Brass In Pocket**

A Ficlet starring Bulma and Vegeta

Disclaimer: I don't own Dragonball Z. Akira Toriyama, et al. do. I'm just having some fun.

Notes: These are drabbles written for a Live Journal thing called Stages of Love. There were five stages, but I only wrote something original for the first three, and honestly prefer just they way it ends with just the three. The last two were previously written drabbles I just plugged into the final two stages. Section titles are the "stage of love."

This get-together scenario was inspired by the fab Pretenders song, Brass in Pocket; hence the title. Google the lyrics if you're interested.

**Attaction: **

"Woman, I demand that you cease doing whatever it is you're doing, and repair ---- _Ow!_"

He never saw Bulma look up, barely saw her hand move as she reached across her desk to push a small button. He only saw the flash of the laser as it singed his ear.

"What the fuck?" he snarled.

She finally looked up from her work. "I'm tired of your demands, Vegeta. I decided that every time you stomp in here and yell for me to fix something, I'm going to punish you somehow to teach you a lesson."

His eyes searched the room to where the small laser cannon was mounted. "You won't hit me again with that thing."

"I know that, Vegeta. That was just lesson number one. I've got all sorts of nasty surprises for you if you don't start treating me with some respect. I suggest you ask for things nicely from now on."

Nicely? Ask for things _nicely?_ Or she was going to . . . _attack_ him somehow? The idea was so incredible, it was stupefying. Teach him a _lesson? _

As he stared into her blue eyes, the ones that waited for his response to her challenge, he realized that yes, he _had_ learned a lesson:

Asking for things nicely wouldn't be very much fun. No, not much fun at all. His original mission forgotten, Vegeta left her office and contemplated what else he could break.

**Romance:**

Perhaps if Vegeta had watched more Earth cartoons, he wouldn't have been surprised to find himself two hundred feet below Bulma's office in Capsule Corporation's basement. Most of her attacks had been of the personal variety, that is, attacks on his person. He'd been burned by a pen-sized flamethrower and frozen with liquid nitrogen. He'd seen high-tech laser containment devices and low-tech buckets over the door. But until the floor opened up underneath him, and gravity sent him spiraling down into darkness, it had never occurred to him that she would simply _dump_ him.

She was kneeling by the edge of her little magic _doorway to doom_ when he ascended. A smile played around her lips.

"You know," she said, standing and surveying his hastily reconstructed dignity, "I think you're enjoying this."

The trapdoor closed, and Vegeta touched down. "I think," he said with deliberate menace, "that you should repair the combat bots that I told you about yesterday, and the hydrospanners I destroyed today. _Now._"

Bulma smiled. "Wrong answer."

And then he was falling again, being pulled by gravity that was clearly unnatural until he landed in a sprawling heap on the basement floor.

"Are you having fun yet?" she called and then sealed the trapdoor shut.

He would have blasted the doorway, but he knew that she somehow would have sealed it against his blasts. He looked around the basement, at the boxes containing capsule after capsule of Kami knew what, and wondered what he would do when she missed. Because surely she would miss sooner or later and then . . .? What would he do? He'd have to kill her, he supposed. His limited imagination could think of no other option. _Pity_, he thought, as he navigated his way through the maze that was the Capsule Corporation compound. _She really is quite entertaining._

**Passion:  
**

And then one day, as he predicted, _she missed._

She re-used the laser cannon she'd had used on the first day. Part of him was disappointed; after all, he had _warned_ her she would never hit him with it again. But she had made that critical and disappointing error, and now she was trapped in his arms against the wall.

"You missed," he said.

"Did I?" she asked. It was then that he noticed how incredibly unafraid she was to be trapped in his arms, how incredibly smug she looked that she was there at all. "Maybe I got exactly what I was aiming for." Then she raised one fine-boned hand and pulled his face closer. She tilted hers slightly and pressed those smiling lips to his, parted his lips with her tongue and swept it inside. She explored his mouth with the wonder of someone who had finally got to hold a treasured object. Reverently, gently, and yet there was an question there as well, as if she were begging for some response, some sign that the object _wanted _to be held. Then her hands grazed his flesh, his shoulders, his ribcage, his hips, asking pleading, _do you, will you, can I? _

No one had ever asked those questions before, or if they had, no one had ever asked them so eloquently. As his brain (always late to the party) pondered its answer to the question, his hands answered _yes_, and then his lips. _Yes, _they said._ You can . . . . hold me. _

Vegeta would not understand all the repercussions of _being held_ for a long time. But now, as her hands were stroking, cupping, _holding, _he couldn't imagine anything other than the immediacy of this moment, the urge to put himself into her hands . . . _and take her into his._

**Intimacy:**

Open air and sunshine, a gentle breeze. A blanket on grass, an empty picnic basket.

"Everything's so green here," he said. "Don't you get sick of looking at green?"

"Of course not," she answered and then pointed to the sky. "There's lot's of blue. You get tired of looking at blue too?"

He looked at her and drawled, "Surprisingly, no."

She froze. He watched her cheeks fill with color.

"I don't get tired of seeing red either."

She punched him. He laughed.

**Commitment: **

'I_t won't kill you to admit you give a damn about Trunks and me, you know."_

Odd to remember that now, he thought. He couldn't remember the exact time or place she'd said it, but he could picture her rolling her eyes as she said it. He must have said something was _pointless_ or _meaningless_ or _worthless._  
Maybe he'd snorted too loud after she made some emotional pronouncement; maybe she'd tried to be affectionate in front of someone else. It could have been anything. But that moment—her voice, those eyes, the lift of her lips as she said it---he remembered it with perfect clarify.

But maybe it wasn't odd to remember it after all. He looked down at the lavender head he held against him, the boy so close to squirming away---_"you're embarrassing me, Dad." _Because with remembering it, he realized she was wrong. Bulma was _wrong_---finally, unconditionally, irrevocably_ wrong_.

His only regret was that he wouldn't live to rub it in her face.

Thanks for reading. Comments are welcome.


End file.
